How Hosting or Squelching Science Determines Where Progress Goes Next

In 1642, Galileo died and Newton was born. That's still a poignant symbol of the hand off from Italy to Britain for progress.

In 1500, Italy's per capita GDP was about 50% higher than Britain's. By 1820, Britain's per capita GDP was about 50% higher than Italy's.

Galileo was arguing that the earth rotated around the sun. The church had the authority of Joshua 10:13, a verse that made it clear that it was in fact the sun that orbited the earth. They put Galileo under house arrest and made it clear that developing theories based on observation was not to be tolerated as long as Italy had the church's authority.

Science traveled north. The Protestants of Northern Europe accommodated Galileo's theories and became host to the scientific method that the Italians had helped revive from Greek and Roman time. Newton went further than Galileo, developing a set of laws to explain what Galileo observed. Newton's science and math became a foundation for the Enlightenment and that, in turn, became a foundation for the Industrial Revolution and Democracy. Italy protected its past and the UK created a new future.

Today, we have a similar inflection point in the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy. China now leads in the production of wind turbines and solar panels. Meanwhile, we Americans have elected a president intent on protecting coal - an industry that dates back to the time of Newton. Trump - like so many of his supporters - denies climate change in the same way that the Catholic Church denied we orbit around the sun. And science, less interested in the vested interests of coal industry profits or old testament prophets than reality, is shifting away from the greatest home to science since, well, Italy during the Renaissance or the UK during the Enlightenment.

Economic growth and prosperity follows science. It has for centuries. If we continue to deny the reality of climate change and what that means for a shift in strategies and the source of prosperity, we will play the role of Italy in the 1600s. It's not a good role. Shakespeare - born the same year as Galileo - set half his tragedies there.

What if the Senate is Obsolete?

As economic power and population shifted from rural farms to industrializing cities in decades around 1900, Britain and Germany changed how their parliaments were defined. US legislature hasn't made that shift in representation and probably should. This is going to be contentious.

As Britain pioneered the industrial revolution, Manchester's population exploded. A center for industrialization, Manchester grew to become the UK's third largest city (after London and Glasgow) by 1901. Between 1700 and 1800 it grew from fewer than 10,000 to about 90,000.  Manchester's population doubled between 1801 and 1820 and then doubled again by 1850.

Yet when it began its growth, Parliamentary representation was granted to districts. Manchester did not even elect its own Members of Parliament (MPs) in the early 19th century. It was just part of the Lancashire district.

Meanwhile, in "rotten boroughs," a paltry few could elect two MPs. How few? In one borough, 7 voters got to elect 2 MPs. Dunwich had literally fallen into the sea, leaving just 32 voters clinging to land; they, too, got to elect 2 MPs. In a sense, this was representation by acreage.

The economy changed how population and power was distributed. Industrialization brought workers into cities like Manchester and left behind smaller populations in the little rural communities that - in part thanks to industrialization - needed fewer people to raise crops and tend livestock. While the population and economies of cities grew, their political representation had not.

This changed in the UK (the disparity between Dunwich and Manchester began to be addressed with legislation in 1832) and, later, in Germany, Austria and France through a series of parliamentary reforms starting in the early 1800s and continuing through the first world war. As the economy shifted from agriculture to industrial, as the important factor shifted from land to capital, these communities shifted political power to give voice to the members of this new economy.

The need for such a shift in the US is less dramatic. At least in the House. Divided into 435 districts by population (obviously a number that grows every decade), the US is not going to have anything as egregious as 7 people electing two representatives.

Nonetheless, the Senate is still structured around the notion that acreage deserves representation. Like the early forms of British parliament that found themselves antiquated by urbanization and industrialization, the US Senate gives disproportionate representation to owners of land rather than capital or knowledge. Two states, Wyoming and Vermont, have populations smaller than Washington DC. Those states have four senators and DC has none. 21 states with a population of 36 million get 42 senators; California with a population of 39 million gets 2 senators. In one part of the country, you are just one of 850,000 voices your senator must represent; in another, you are one of 19.7 million voices

California has helped to pioneer the information and entrepreneurial economies and that has made it successful in industries like aerospace, communications, silicon, software, biotech, and the internet. Of the 100 most valuable companies in the world earlier this year, the market cap of companies in California represented $4.2 trillion of the US's $14.1 trillion (and of the world's $21.2 trillion). California represents 12.4% of the American population and 30% of the value of the country's biggest companies. Like Manchester in the early 19th century, California's lead in creating jobs and wealth has not yet translated into commensurate representation.

In 1790, when the US was founded, 90% of workers were in agriculture. Acreage was a pretty good proxy for good representation at that time. Agriculture now employs fewer than 2% of American workers. Acreage is now a terrible approximation of how representation should be calculated. (And yes, I know that technically the Senate is a way to represent states not acreage but it does effectively do that. State representation does not follow people around as they move; states "govern" over a constant and stable area, not a constant and stable population. What this effectively means is that Senators represent acreage.)

As it now stands, the politics in the US is going to be disproportionately defined by the least populous and least affluent areas of the country because of how the Senate is structured. It's hard to imagine us ignoring that for too much longer or imagine that addressing this issue will ever be easy.

Nick Clegg - Britain's New (favored) Beta Male

Intriguingly, some research into primate behavior suggests that the beta male actually does better than the alpha male. Eager to keep his position atop the heap, and needing a key ally to do this, the alpha male is more likely to favor the beta male with choice food and females so as to not lose the beta male to a competing alpha.

In yesterday's election in Britain, the Conservative Party won but did not win enough. That is, in order to rule, the conservatives will have to form a coalition government with another party. The problem with this is that, in this sense, the Labour Party is tied with the Conservative Party. That is, whichever party is able to partner with the third-place Liberal Democrats will rule. And this would appear to make Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg Britain's favored beta male. Without Clegg's cooperation, neither Labour nor Conservative can rule.

This is a fascinating election for so many reasons but one, of course, is that Britain faces very similar issues as the US. The most obvious similarity is the need to deal with the aftermath of the financial crisis and Great Recession.

To me, it's unfortunate that the Conservative Party did not win outright. The Brits will run a record deficit (11% of GDP) this year and the definite impression I got was that Cameron (the Conservatives leader) was more interested in reducing spending than slashing taxes, which should make Conservatives far more effective at reducing the deficit. Further, as mentioned in the last post, I got the distinct impression that Cameron has a better plan for implementing real reform in the city (London's Wall Street, or financial community).

But instead, Nick Clegg will likely dictate terms to the next administration. What left me unimpressed with Clegg was his seeming reliance upon general voter discontentment with the two main parties. Imagine a candidate standing up between Bush and Kerry and saying, "C'mon. You're not happy with these two. You know it. Vote for me." Crafting an effective policy requires doing more than expressing disgust with the main parties. I never really heard how Clegg's Liberal Democrats offered a coherent difference from either main party. And yet he will get to be the favored beta male. Watching the coalition government rule may well be as fascinating as watching the election. The jockeying for position is not over yet.

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Oh, and by the way, my politics have not changed. I envy the Brits their conservative party. Sometimes a country needs to move in the direction of self reliance and smaller government and sometimes it needs to move in the direction of more regulation and public programs. Neither direction is a foregone conclusion any more than you can say whether you'll more often turn right or left on your drive to the store. But here in the states, our conservative party has been hijacked by people who deny climate change is a risk, deny health care is a right, and whose only economic development trick seems to be cutting taxes. If the Republicans looked more like Britain's Conservative Party, they'd be hard to beat. Instead, they're ruled by obstructionists reactionaries who deify Ronald Reagan but would reject him as a candidate for having actually raised taxes twice. But people do learn.